The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  What, then does Thebes as a topos represent for Athens on the dramatic stage in the theater of Dionysos? . . . I propose that [it] functions in the theater as an anti-Athens, an other place. If we say that theater in general functions as an “other scene” where the city puts itself and its values into question by projecting itself upon the stage to confront the present with the past through its ancient myths, then Thebes . . . is the “other scene” of the “other scene” that is the theater itself, . . . [where] Athens acts out questions crucial to the polis, the self, the family, and society, . . . displaced upon a city that is imagined as the mirror opposite of Athens.108

  To put this another way, Thebes in Ismēnias’s account—the Thebes of Attic tragedy—possesses no identity of its own: entirely tropological (“other”), it serves as lieu commun that allowed Athenian playwrights of the fifth century BCE to represent issues that affected Athens,109 but which did not necessarily coincide with those that troubled Thebes.110 Metonymically, then, Alexander’s destruction of “Thebes” functions as a displaced blow struck against classical Greek culture as a whole—hence the recourse to choliambs which from Hipponax through Callimachus, Catullus, and Martial retained their association with invective and abuse.111

  Not for nothing, then, the Romance calls Ismēnias sophόs and his art of storytelling sophistikόs, for these are the very terms which, at the time of the novel’s composition, Flavius Philostratus, among others, used to describe the itinerant Greek rhētores of the Roman Empire.112 Ultimately, then, Ismēnias serves as a caricature of the Second Sophistic orator who looks back to Thebes-as-Athens’s “finest hour” in order to deliver feigned speeches and compose fictional tales (peplasménoi mûthoi) concerning long-settled historical crises or legendary events. With its historical belatedness and far-fetched Attic diction,113 Ismēnias’s speech looks like nothing so much as a Socratic meletē, for which the audience proposed the topic: “What did Ismēnias [a generic name for ‘any Theban’] say to Alexander in order to persuade him to spare Thebes?”114 Or, to put the matter somewhat more pointedly, the deliberation turns pyrrhically upon the question: “Should Alexander destroy the cultural capital of Athens?,” a self-deconstructing proposition that cuts the entire project of the Second Sophistic to the quick.

  27.3

  Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the European novel assumed as its vocation to question, discomfit, and ultimately to neutralize the various hegemonic uses to which literary language has been put.115 Accordingly, Imperial Greek prose—which Bakhtin assigns to “the prehistory of novelistic discourse”116—passes through three dialectically disposed moments of negation. In the first instance, the Atticizing imperative of the Second Sophistic develops in response to the hegemony of Latin as the official language of the Roman occupation.117 At the same time, however, the sophists did not simply favor classical Attic in their work: they actively policed Greek oratorical diction to the point that Atticism itself effectively became another form of hegemonic discourse.118 It is precisely here, then, that the antisophistic novel makes its point of critical intervention, by insisting on the social diversity of speech types (raznorečie) that make up the literary landscape.119 Thus, the history of Imperial Greek prose consists largely of the dialectical interplay between these competing centripetal and centrifugal linguistic forces. As Bakhtin observes:

  Unitary language constitutes . . . an expression of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not something given [dan], but is always in essence posited [zadan]—and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. . . . At any moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word, . . . but also into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, “professional” and “generic” languages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of view, literary language itself is only one of these heteroglot languages—and in its turn is also stratified into languages (generic, period-bound and others).120

  Alongside the Alexander Romance, which persistently foregrounds this pluralism in its diction, its generic make-up, and its plot (fabula), other novels contemporary with the α-recension deploy alternate modes of resistance to the Second Sophistic. In fact, the pseudobiographical Life of Sekoûndos, dated to the second century CE, carries the critique of the Second Sophistic one step further by explicitly inverting the sophists’ main professional claims—in particular the premise that oratorical mastery leads to power.121 Hence, instead of actively pursuing a Greek education (paideía) and cultivating purity of diction, Sekoûndos “practiced silence [σιωπὴν ἤσκησεν] up until his death.”122 His scruple here concerns the perlocutionary force that speech acts inevitably entail:123 “Recognizing that it was on account of his own tongue [διὰ τῆς αὐτοῦ γλώττης] that his mother’s death had come about, he resolved that he would never speak thereafter” (70).

  Sekoûndos’s reticence thus marks the limit of what Paolo Valesio calls the “rhetoric of anti-rhetoric,” in which “the type of discourse that is explicitly contrary to rhetoric and tries to detach itself from its mechanism [turns out to be] completely under the sway of rhetoric that . . . is actually more sophisticated and devious than the rhetoric from which it pretends to shy away.”124 In this case, Sekoûndos’s abnegation of all speech turns his life into one extended aposiōpēsis,125 a metarhetorical gesture that figures dialogically within the context of a still largely oral culture where not only paideia and prestige, but also the very prospect of subject formation depended upon oratorical display.126 Ironically, Sekoûndos’s silence so aggrandizes his reputation that when Hadrian visits Athens,127 the emperor summons him to an audience in which, true to his convictions, the philosopher refuses to utter anything at all, even under pain of execution. The two, therefore, agree to communicate in writing: Hadrian poses the questions and the philosopher writes back (antigráphein). Sekoûndos, however, prefaces their correspondence with a written prooímion which, instead of eulogizing the emperor according to the protocols of the basílikos lόgos,128 pointedly deflates the imperial maiestas of the future Divus Hadrianus: “You are a human being [ánthrōpos], like the rest of us, subject to every kind of happenstance [páthos]—dust of corporeal decay. The life of irrational beasts [áloga] is such as this” (76). Moreover, instead of praising Hadrian for the lasting monuments that he had erected throughout the empire,129 Sekoûndos stresses the ephemera of life, admonishing the emperor with the well-worn platitude: “Today passes us by, and what tomorrow brings we do not know.”130 He then proceeds to answer the twenty largely fatuous questions that Hadrian proposes: “What is a farmer?” “What is a boat?” “What is the day?” Rather than expatiate upon these topics with either philosophical precision or rhetorical finesse, Sekoûndos concatenates a series of two-word phrases (qualifier + noun) which, taken together, neither cohere into a mimesis of oration nor present a philosophic argument in the way that his answers are made to do in the Armenian and Arabic reworkings of the text. 131

  What Is Poverty?

  A hated good [misoúmenon agathón], a mother of health [hugeías mētēr], an impediment to pleasures [hēdonōn empodismós], a pastime free of care, a possession difficult to cast off, a master of conceits, an inventor of wisdom, an ungrudging occupation, an essence free from intrusion, a trade free of duty, an unapproved gain, a possession on which no one informs, invisible good fortune, good fortune free of care. (88)

  This hodgepodge of bipartite phrases, closer in spirit to Near Eastern wisdom literature than to philosophical discourse in the Hellenic tradition,132 not only repeats and contradicts itself—Sekoûndos describes penury both as an object of hatred (mísēma) and as an unexpected boon (eutúkhēma). The couplings regularly juxtapose classical Attic with Imperial koinē (e.g., dusapόspaston ktēma), including a disproportionate number of neologisms not attested elsewhere in the extant literary corpus (askόpeutos, azēmíōtos, apsēphistos).133
Accordingly, Sekoûndos turns the norms and the ideals of the Second Sophistic inside out. Not only does he make himself into a living sign (sēma), admonishing rhetoricians that they can never predict, much less control, the perlocutionary effects of their own speech acts.134 His performance of silence rather than Attic oration turns out to be as effective in gaining access to the emperor as the cultivated disquisitions of Herodes Atticus or Favorinus. Overall, his jottings to Hadrian, which push to an extreme the paratactic style generally typical of koinē, suggest that the emperor proves just as eager to hear the sun vacuously described as a “sky-traveler” as he is to listen to Polemon of Laodicea’s proposal that he allow Smyrna to erect a second imperial temple in his honor.

  Across the horizons of the second and third centuries CE, however, the Story of Aseneth (Ἱστορία Ἀσενέθ) arguably constitutes the romance that most aggressively contests the goals and priorities of the Second Sophistic, insofar as it repudiates Athenocentrism altogether. Instead, the novel, written in koinē, narrates the marriage between the daughter of Pentephrēs, high priest of the Egyptian temple at Heliopolis ( Jwnw; Grk. Ὄν), and the Israelite patriarch Iosēph, a former convict who had risen to become Pharaoh’s chief advisor and vizier of the Two Lands.135 Although originally, it seems, a Hellenistic composition, multiple recensions of the novel circulated under Roman rule,136 comprising a network of loosely related texts in which no two witnesses turn out to be the same.137 While the emplotment (sjužet) of each redaction varies, the story (fabula) focuses consistently on intermarriage as a trope for cross-cultural connectivity where, in the intrigue of the tale, the convergence of Greek, Egyptian, and Hebraic literary, religious, and political traditions—more forthrightly than in the Alexander Romance—ultimately supersedes ethnic apartheid, thereby effectively undoing both the Greek cultural logic of binary oppositions and the Second Sophistic ideology of Hellenic purity. In the first scene of the romance, Iosēph refuses to eat with Pentephrēs and his wife due to Israelite dietary restrictions, retrojected back from Leuítikon and Deuteronόmion onto the Patriarchal period,138 while Aseneth, generally presumptuous and misandristic, in particular, remains shut up alone in her private tower. Once, however, she catches sight of Iosēph’s beauty and perfection, Aseneth repents and—following a divinely appointed conversion from idolatry to the god of Iosēph (metánoia)—Pharaoh marries the pair, effectively promoting Iosēph to what would have traditionally been the office of Iripat ().139 Shortly thereafter—and here the romance closes—“Pharaoh died and bequeathed his crown (diádēma) to Iosēph, who ruled as king (ebasíleusen) in Egypt for forty-eight years. After this, Iosēph handed the crown over to Pharaoh’s younger son,140 who was still breast-feeding at the time of Pharaoh’s death. And Iosēph was as a father to his son in the land of Egypt all the days of his life.”

  Filling out a leerstelle in the book of Genesis, which only mentions Joseph’s marriage to Aseneth in passing,141 the narrative expansions of the romance not only relate in Greek the union between a Hebrew and an Egyptian—however difficult to realize the novel’s redactions show such cross-cultural conjunctions to be. Iosēph’s regency in Egypt and care for the crown prince simultaneously portray a utopian world where—through the medium of koinē Greek—interethnic dependency and mutual cooperation ultimately prevail. I Esdras, a deuterocanonical book that circulated as part of the Septuagint, composed roughly at the same time as Aseneth,142 provides a backdrop against which the radical nature of the novel becomes clear. In going up from Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem, Esdras—“a man of genius in the law of Mōüsēs” (8.3)—gathers the remnants of the Babylonian captivity and enjoins the former Israelites to shun intermarriage with non-Jews:

  Esdras arose and said to [the people]: “You have transgressed the law [ēnomēsate] in marrying foreign wives [gunaixìn allogenési], to increase the sins of Israel. But now give glory to the God of our fathers; do his will and separate yourselves from the peoples of the land [χωρίσθητε ἀπὸ τῶν ἐθνῶν τῆς γῆς], and from the alien women.” Then the whole multitude cried out in a loud voice, “Just as you have spoken, so we shall do.” (9.7–10)

  Max Weber, in his study Das antike Jundentum, traces the historical byways that led Jews of the Second Temple period to (re)define themselves as a “pariah people,” that is, “a distinctive hereditary social group lacking autonomous political organization and characterized by prohibitions against commensality and intermarriage.”143 Thus, while Esdras insists on policing the line that separates Jews from other peoples, autonomous but powerless under Īrānian—and by extension Macedonian and Roman—rule, the Story of Aseneth imagines a wholly different set of social possibilities.

  As such, the novel constitutes a radical break not only with the strictures of Second Temple Judaism, but also with the world of Dio and Herodes Atticus. Instead, the romance—whose power one too easily defuses by sequestering it from the Greco-Roman tradition as part of “Jewish literature between the Bible and the Mishnah”144—envisions a field of cultural production where relational modes of thought prevail over what Ernst Cassirer called “substantialist thinking,”145 which tends to privilege individuals over structural positioning. In “Expecting the Barbarians” (1904), Constantine Cavafy famously described this cultural precipice as follows:

  Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους.

  Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μιά κάποια λύσις.

  And now what shall become of us without barbarians?

  Those people were a kind of solution.146

  In the context of the Second Sophistic, where privilege turned on the double valorization of héllēnes over bárbaroi and pepaideuménoi over apaídeutoi—measured by the acme of an idealized Attic past—the Story of Aseneth portrays a world in which these oppositions and such criteria fail to do justice to the historical and ethnic complexities of East Mediterranean societies and cultures. Thus, in Cavafy’s katharevousa, the poem’s final word, lúsis, can mean either “solution” or “dissolution,” as if to suggest that, for Greeks, however productive “barbarians” at one time may have proved “good to think with”147 investment in this opposition concomitantly led to the undoing of classical Greek thought.148 It is not the least of the antisophistic novels’ provocations that it proves impossible to say anything about their origins: whether the compositors—we cannot yet speak here of an “author”149—were Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Egyptian, Armenian, or Syriac, all we know is that they succeeded in articulating an intuition of the world (Weltanschauung) as it inheres within the image of Greek—not as fossilized in some ideal past, but—as it continued to grow and develop under Roman rule. With the birth of koinē fiction, Second Sophistic discourse disappears.

  FURTHER READING

  Anderson, G. 1984. Ancient Fiction: The Novel in the Graeco-Roman World. London.

  Braun, M. 1938. History and Romance in Greco-Oriental Literature. Oxford.

  Hägg, T. 1991. The Novel in Antiquity. Rev. ed. Berkeley, CA.

  Hanson, W. ed. 1998. Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature. Bloomington, IN.

  Holzberg. N. 1995. The Ancient Novel: An Introduction. London and New York.

  Merkelbach, R. 1962. Roman und Mysterium in der Antike. Munich.

  Morgan, J. R., and R. Stoneman, Greek Fiction. New York.

  Reardon, B. P. 1991. The Form of Greek Romance. Princeton, NJ.

  Reardon, B. P., ed. 2008. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA.

  Rohde, E. 1914. Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer. 3rd ed. Leipzig.

  Schmeling, G., ed. The Novel in the Ancient World. Rev. ed. Leiden.

  Stoneman, R. 2007–. Il Romanzo di Alessandro. 3 vols. Milan.

  Swain, S., ed. 1999. Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel. Oxford.

  Takahashi, H. 2014. “Syriac as a Vehicle for Transmission of Knowledge across Borders of Empires.” Horizons 5: 29–52.

  Tatum, J., ed. 1994. Th
e Search for the Ancient Novel. Baltimore, MD.

  Whitmarsh, T., ed. 2008. The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel. Cambridge.

  Whitmarsh, T. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Abel, F. M. 1927. Grammaire du grec biblique. 2nd ed. Paris.

  Acosta-Hughes, B. 2002. Polyeideia: The “Iambi” of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition. Berkeley, CA.

  Acosta-Hughes, B., L. Lehnus, and S. Stephens, eds. 2011. Brill’s Companion to Callimachus. Leiden.

  Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London and New York.

  Anson, E. M. 2009. “Greek Ethnicity and the Greek Language.” Glotta 85: 5–30.

  Asper, M. 2011. “Dimensions of Power: Callimachean Geopoetics and the Ptolemaic Empire.” In Brill’s Companion to Callimachus, edited by B. Acosta-Hughes, L. Lehnus, and S. Stephens, 155–177. Leiden.

  Assmann, J. 2006. Ma'at. Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im Alten Ägypten. Munich.

  Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Edited by J. Urmson and M. Sbisà. Cambridge, MA.

  Bakhtin, M. M. 1975. Vaprosy literatury i ĕstetiki. Moscow.